đ THE GHOST CARS OF DISNEYLANDâS RADIATOR SPRINGS RACERS đ
What follows is a short rabbit hole of useless and potentially erroneous info about the Cars Land Radiator Springs Racers ride at Disneyâs California Adventure.
It is the summer of 2019 at Disneyâs California Adventure. Did you know that before the park opened and after the park closed, the cars of the Radiator Springs Ride ran the course without any passengers, and they even got to take fun selfies like this oneâŚ?
How was this figured out? Well, when you get off many of the bigger attractions, thereâs a picture kiosk waiting for you that hocks DisneyPhoto Pass reaction shots from the ride. First time we went on the Cars ride, we took a camera phone shot of the kiosk, but I framed the picture badly and it didnât include the full photo ID number above the image to find the photo on the app later on. #CompositionFail.
Sampling images from other rides, it seems that each Photo ID has a letter prefix that Iâm guessing corresponds to the rideâs name.
R = Radiator Springs Racers | M = HyperSpace Mountain
It appears that the R numbers are in chronological order⌠so maybe we could guess our earlier photo ID number within a range of nearby numbers? But where should we start with our guesses?
We went on the ride again right away and took a better snapshot of the ID number. Downloading any source photo from the Disney PhotoPass app and checking the time stamp in Adobe Bridge or other âGet Infoâ photo options reveals that it includes an accurate reflection of the time in the metadata. My bad composition camera phone picture had a date and time stamp to compare so weâre in business. This search and rescue operation might actually work!
From the time a ride photo is taken to the time you can get off the ride and briskly walk to the photo kiosk is about two minutes. Estimating a photo of a ride every two minutes put forth a guess of a range of photo ID numbers that I thought might correspond to about when we did the ride the first time. I wildly overshot the estimate, beginning this here rabbit hole.
Turns out that anything in the PhotoPass site with a time stamp of yesterday has a large permanent watermark over the photo. Disney probably knows from their ticket tracking scanners that we werenât in the park that day and keeps us from downloading random photos all willy-nilly. But the photos are clean at the start of the day that we were there. Semi-randomly entering photo ID numbers on either side of midnight revealed these late night and early morning ghost carsâŚ
Looks like sometimes the camera fires off a little early, getting just a little bit of the carâs face.
Cycling through these human-free moments got me noticing that each car color has its own face personality. I see you, Lightning McQueen with your sly eyebrow of determination.
âŚbut after an hour of trial and error, nothing was getting me closer to finding the original photo I was looking for. The cars with the time stamp that we would have been on the ride were all wrong wrong wrong.
I had to call the Disney PhotoPass help line at this point. Robert was very helpful. Seeing as Radiator Springs Racers is one of the only rides at the park that runs two tracks at the same time, he pointed out what I should have realized was obvious â thereâs actually a left camera and a right camera on the archway. You know the part when you get to face off and race the other car. Yea, that part. Each lane has a camera! Duh!
Robert was quite pleasant and patient and shared that the left camera gets a different R# ID prefix than the right camera R# ID. The right gets an R6x label and the left gets R2x. Iâd like to imagine that maybe these numbers both increment at the million riders mark, so someday soon theyâll be R3 and R7.
Bad math time. Based on the time stamps between photos, it appears that the rides can handle two tandem cars every 45 seconds. The ride is typically open 8am â 10pm, a total of 840 minutes. Fudging for some ride downtime, letâs say 800 minutes and 6 total riders per, times 6 more riders for the other car. Thatâs at least 9,000 riders a day, 67,000 riders a week, 3.5 million+ riders per year. Maybe plausible?
Back on the original track, how might any of this be useful? Well, having an empty car in the same position and size and color as a car full of people is like having the Infinity Gauntlet from The Avengers. It makes it super easy to photoshop out all the random humans sitting next to you so it would appear that you had the entire car to yourself, which is either the greatest thing to do or the saddest thing depending on your perspective on life.
Anyway, there ya have it. If you end up getting to go someday, rumor has it that right lane cars win more often then left lane cars. Plan accordingly as you approach the boarding queue.
đ Good luck, racers! đ
